What is it about poignant good-byes, the ones that bring you back to your first painful partings?

I remember mine well. The youngest of four siblings, my brothers were leaving for college when I was in first grade. Looking back I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for them to walk away from two weeping younger sisters and a mother. Thank god Dad kept it together or we might have tried to stop them from getting on with their lives. I remember the painful clinging, the letting go, the sitting in solitude in my bedroom looking at books my brother Michael gave to me. He loved to read, and he passed that on to me.

Being the one to leave is easier somehow. You have plans in mind, a life beyond the present—not that there’s an indictment on the present but rather a yearning for more.

Throughout your lifetime you let go—out of necessity—of many things you love: parents, pets, friends, relatives, spouses, workmates, jobs, material things. Material things are easiest and for a reason: they don’t make you any happier, so their absence shouldn’t make you any sadder. It’s the experiences around those material things that are worth preserving in memory; they don’t need to be kept in perpetuity.

All good-byes require reckoning, each one a tattoo on the heart. Funny how a certain memory brought about by some visual or auditory cue can bring someone back, just like that. 

Today as I was driving my sister to the airport after a perfect, infrequent visit, we rode listening to the radio and on comes Norah Jones’s “Sunrise.” Every time I hear that song I think of my golden retriever Luna, dead for 12 years now. Whenever she heard Norah’s voice, she stopped whatever she was doing in recognition with a tail wag. Something about her voice resonated with that dog and she acknowledged her approval. What I would have given in that moment in the car to see Luna again—but I realize that I did see Luna again for a brief moment just not in flesh form. She came to me in a memory. I don’t think about her every day any more, like I once did. It doesn’t mean I love her any less. It’s just that life moves on. Other animal friends take up the space left behind by her loss.

During the holiday season losses are more acute because you spend so much time building memories around rituals—family get-togethers, traditions, meals, and gestures. Baking a favorite cookie made for decades by a mom no longer on Earth, and boom, it takes you right back to being a little girl in her kitchen—helping her mix the batter, licking the beaters before they find their way to the sink, offering to be the beta tester to make sure the first batch out of the oven is alright, and smelling the comforting familiar. Darn it, Mom, we miss you every day of the year, but during the holidays it’s still very raw to be missing you.

During my sister’s visit, we visited Garden of the Gods nearby, a sacred place for many. My father never saw it—not in earthly form, but we felt him there in acknowledgement that it was exactly the kind of place he would have loved. He was a man of the earth, a farmer’s son, and outdoorsmen. He loved the sun, the landscape, and its critters. He was walking with us, if only for a moment.

As it is for all of us, loss, or how you deal with it, is a powerful sculptor in your life. Being able to close a door, however painful, allows you to open it up for new experiences, new people, new loves. Making room. We never see it that way at the time; in the moment it’s all about the mourning, the pain of finality. When my marriage unexpectedly ended, I couldn’t see ahead to being in love again. I couldn’t see beyond my own anger and heartbreak. I felt completely gutted, and resented loving someone so much that I could be made to feel that way. But that’s a necessary part of loving anyone or anything, being able to surrender to it.

Some people can’t do that. They’re the ones who perhaps get one pet and after its death vow never to get another, sentencing themselves to protecting their heart from the worst rather than nurturing it with a dose of exactly what it needs, more love. Heart muscles require Big Love, and the more it gets, the stronger you become to reckon what you must.

As with all reckoning, you take stock of your life remembering singular years that tip the scale in one direction or another, either on the joyous spectrum or the absolute challenge spectrum. On balance I would categorize last year (2018) as a challenging one. I’m grateful for my family and friends, getting to see Hamilton, visiting Alaska with the “new/old” love of my life (a remarkable story for another blog post), having some family members move to Colorado, living in a beautiful place. I ended the year having left a job without a charted path forward and even more heart-wrenching, losing my furry pal Seamus. But I am easily reminded that others have had tougher times: illness, losing a spouse or a child, severing an emotional and physical tie to a homestead that provided shelter for 60-plus years. Still others have coped with the complicated grief of losing an ex-spouse to death, stirring up decades of conflicting emotions, made more poignant and emotional by children. 

Witnessing the struggle of human existence replaces whatever tendency I have to wallow with a reservoir of empathy. You and I will prevail, persevere, open doors, greet new days and experiences knowing too that they won’t last. The rhythm of life insists on giving way to partings. 

What coping mechanisms would you share for your own partings?